From the banks of the Merrimack, a rowboat with history

By David Coggins

Bobby Fisher

A 16-foot Banks Dory by Lowell’s Boat Shop.

Buying a Lowell’s boat is an elaborate process, akin to having a suit made. Customers inevitably want to tweak details of a basic template that has barely changed since the company was established in Amesbury, Mass., in 1793. These skiffs are not typical workhorses but more like Dutch stand-up bicycles: beautiful objects conceived for comfort, ease and taking in the surroundings. Requiring up to 200 hours to build and costing between $7,500 and $15,000, depending on the length and the type of planking (from white cedar to Honduran mahogany) and finish (simple to highly varnished “yacht”), it’s no wonder these boats are intended to be passed down the generations.

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Obsessive customers receive photographic updates over the months that they wait, but that’s not always enough. Some people are “like mother hens about their boats,” calling the builders directly for updates, says George Odell, who worked in Lowell’s cedar-pungent workshop for 20 years. Amesbury remains the quintessential New England town, with small churches and wooden-frame houses perched serenely above the bank of the Merrimack River. And Lowell’s complex of buildings, a National Historic Landmark, is a home to true believers. After being family-run by seven generations of Lowells and some newcomers in the 1990s, the company nearly closed in 2005 and is now helmed by a nonprofit foundation. Everyone volunteers except the builders themselves, who handcraft about a dozen boats a year.

For prospective owners, one of the final decisions may be the most fun: the color of the boat. Hardcore bluebloods are welcome to keep their boats a discreet gray, but some buyers indulge in interiors of the company’s vivid Amesbury Blue—somewhere between the tone of a robin’s egg and a Tiffany box. On the water they’re all the same, of course: “They’re wonderfully solid boats to use,” says Pam Bates, executive director of Lowell’s. “They sound a lot better on the water—they don’t go ‘ping ping ping,’ they go ‘lap lap lap.’ ” That’s the pleasure of historically sound design.